1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to delivering web pages and other objects from a server, using techniques such as predictive predownload and delta encoding.
2. Description of Related Art
When serving web pages and other objects from a web server, it is advantageous to substantially minimize the amount of time needed to send those objects from the server to the requesting client (also known as a browser).
One method includes attempting to maintain template information already known to the client, and to send only delta information from the server to the client. However, the template information must be determined and sent to the client after the client has requested a corresponding web page. This method suffers from the drawback that it does not substantially minimize the amount of time required to present the page to a client as because the template information, the delta information (or both) are not sent to the client as soon as possible.
Another method is to predownload web pages or other objects from the server to the client. This method includes selecting one or more next objects the client is likely to request, and sending those next objects from the server to the client in a predownload time before the client actually requests those next objects. However, this suffers from the drawback that if the selected next objects take a relatively long time to predownload, there is a substantial chance they might not be fully received before the client makes its next request.